Optimizing Mobile Health Routing and Scheduling to Enhance Healthcare Access

Accessibility of health services, particularly for underserved communities, is challenged by lack of transportation options. Those without cars must often rely on delivery of health services to their area, which may be limited by scheduling and routing mobile health unit challenges. In this work, researchers identify the optimal schedule and route for mobile vaccination teams visiting patients in their homes and communities to meet patient demands while limiting travel costs. The researchers will partner with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (LACDPH) mobile vaccination team to ensure that their results will consider real-world challenges and considerations (letter of participation included). Nurses must be arranged into teams with specific compositions (e.g., in skills or language capability) to be deployed to an optimally chosen sequence of locations to minimize costs while ensuring adequate patient coverage. This includes location and scheduling constraints, travel cost and resource constraints, as well as labor force requirements that mandate specific working hours. The resultant problem is of both practical and methodological importance. Besides having direct application to operations at the LACDPH, which serves almost 10 million county residents, this problem combines both aspects of scheduling and routing problems, resulting in a formulation of intersecting vehicle routing problems (VRPs) that must be solved simultaneously. VRPs are an active area of transportation research, and considering them within the context of team composition, as the researchers do here, would push the boundaries of current transportation technological understanding.

• Record URL:
  https://metrans.org/research/optimizing-mobile-health-routing-and-scheduling-to-enhance-healthcare-access

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Programmed
• Funding: $100000
• Contract Numbers:

  69A3552348309

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Office of the Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology

  University Transportation Centers Program
  Department of Transportation
  Washington, DC  United States  20590
• Managing Organizations:

  METRANS Transportation Consortium

  University of Southern California
  Los Angeles, CA  United States 
• Project Managers:

  Hong, Jennifer

  Bruner, Britain

• Principal Investigators:

  Suen, Sze-chuan

  Dessouky, Maged

• Start Date: 20240815
• Expected Completion Date: 20240814
• Actual Completion Date: 0
• USDOT Program: University Transportation Centers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Equity; Health care services; Routes and routing; Scheduling
• Identifier Terms: Vehicle Routing Problem
• Geographic Terms: Los Angeles County (California)
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Society;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01928979
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center
• Contract Numbers: 69A3552348309
• Files: UTC, RIP
• Created Date: Aug 27 2024 4:56PM